CMSW2009-11-19

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CMS Weekly is a Technology Podcast with news from the world of Content Management and Enterprise Social Networking

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Welcome to Greg Knaddison

by Andy McCaskey

Direct from a security conference in Washington DC, we are joined this week by Greg Knaddison, of Growing Venture Solutions in Denver. Greg was a major force behind DrupalCamp in Denver last summer, interviewed by Kara Karsten. Greg covers a range of Drupal related comments as we address stories in the news about Cloud Computing, the shift of Recovery.gov to Sharepoint (Away from Drupal), some of the rewards for participating in open source community efforts, and other topics.

Greg was kind enough to join us directly from the convention center- so there is a bit of noise on the audio, but some great content. Thanks to Greg for joining us !

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The CMS and ECM World has a number of well recognized authors, from the publishing house Packt (pronounced Packed, as in packed with information.) The Author of the Year Award announced by Packt goes to Jeff Potts for his Alfresco Developer Guide.

The award was determined first by readers nominating their preferred candidates, with the final decision being made by a panel of judges. The final nominees were 6 books on such diverse topics as Drupal, Javascript and SOA.
Aaron Winborn for Drupal Multimedia;
Matt Butcher for Learning Drupal 6 Module Development;
Shea Fredrick, Colin Ramsay and Steve “Cutter” Blades jointly for Learning Ext JS;
Stoyan Stefanov for Object-Oriented JavaScript;
Vincenzo Caselli,
Binildas A. Christudas,
Malhar Barai jointly for Service Oriented Architecture with Java.

Packt is a print on demand publishing company based in Birmingham, UK. Founded in 2004 as an independent company, they focus on supporting and promoting Open Source. In 2008, Packt’s donations to Open Source Projects broke the $100,000 barrier. Next contest at packtpub – 2009 Open Source CMS Award. More details at http://www.packtpub.com/award.

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Alfresco will provide an open source Amazon EC2-ready stack and developer kit for customers and partners to develop, deploy and monetize cloud service architecture content applications on the EC2 platform.

The Alfresco Cloud Developer Program, offering “early adopter” advantages to its partners to deliver cloud-ready content applications for collaboration, document and records management. Alfresco will also offer a subscription for those requiring expert Enterprise 24/7 support.

According to the study “Above the Clouds: a Berkeley View of Cloud Computing,” the cost of cloud computing is one-fifth to one-seventh of that offered to a medium sized data center. By promoting the CMIS standard and making it easy to get on board the cloud, Alfresco is providing a great service to promote the success of their ECM solution. Sounds like a winning combination.

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The open source enterprise content management company has unveiled a developer program for those looking to host both the community and enterprise versions of its software on the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform. Alfresco is a leading open source alternative for document and Web content management, competing strongly with ECM giants like Open Text, Documentum, and SharePoint.

The core of what Alfresco is offering is an AMI (Amazon Machine Image), a pre-built software package for creating a virtual machine on EC2. The first Alfresco AMI is only for the community edition, and doesn’t include their SharePoint module or the mobile browser UI for accessing Alfresco from smartphones. Alfresco is planning future releases that will support all editions.

See the last TechPodcasts roundtable for a simple introduction for getting started with Amazon cloud services – that used an older AMI from Bitnami – so put in the new image, and you should be ready to go.

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An interview with Peter Morris, program manager and Justin Codd, systems architect on open source products used in a solution for the largest British college exam board Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA). The project requirements were a secure extranet capable of delivering materials to 35,000 examiners and moderators at low cost. Also, meet an insanely tight schedule of 6 weeks to deploy, test and get it into production. Optaros consultants were hired to work with existing team members on integrating open source technology with their existing architecture.

Cost savings are believed to be in the range of £100,000, mostly just in printing and shipping costs for the required materials. Lessons learned – could be applied to most any project. Morris and Codd’s Dos and Don’ts for taking the open source path:

Do…

Apply the same levels of due diligence and assessment applied to open-source-based products to any other proprietary solutions that may also be in the running.

Carefully research the reputation and operational models of any organizations whose open-source products and services you are investigating for eventual deployment.

Clearly communicate with management the aims and goals of assessing and implementing open-source products and regularly brief them with progress.

Evaluate and assess any candidate open-source products and services against a common benchmark incorporating any key business specific requirements in the assessment.

Examine subscription (licensing) and support models of open-source solutions, and understand how they contrast with proprietary commercial software vendors models.

Understand how open-source software and services compare and contrast with proprietary commercial products.

Don’t….

Skimp on conducting comparative evaluations and assessments.

Assume that open-source technologies can necessarily be implemented to a quicker timescale or a lower manpower overhead than proprietary ones.

Assume that you will always be able to find a viable open-source product to service your particular set of organizational or technical requirements: so be realistic and pragmatic when presenting the case for open-source to management.

Skimp on support or rely on community support alone for important systems and services.

Make your organization’s first venture to open source higher-risk than it needs to be. Explore running open-source alongside existing proprietary software.

Overlook or ignore the gap that may exist between the current skills of staff and those that may be required to use/operate any new open-source products or services that are introduced into an organization.

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6 Alfresco meetups have been scheduled for the US and Europe. Washington, DC and Madrid on Oct 20; Atlanta GA and Milan Italy on the 27th or 28th of October. Frankfurt, Germany on Nov 3; Los Angeles, CA on Nov 10.

A day or two left to get the early bird fee (end of Sept deadline). This event is designed for Alfresco Enterprise Customers, Certified Partners, Active Community Members and Developers. Sessions are suitable for both business and technical users of Alfresco.

These are informal one day events for updating and educating Alfresco Enterprise Customers, Certified Partners, Active Community Members and Developers on the latest developments at Alfresco Software. They also provide the usual networking opportunities as well as Alfresco Master Classes.

Specific topics include

• Getting Started with CMIS
• Records Management Trends & Usage Best Practices
• Customizing Alfresco Share
• Implementation & Migration Project Management
• Rollout and Adoption Best Practices

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CMSW2009-10-05

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• Alfresco Gains DOD Certification
• Why Few Themes in Drupal ?
• Joomla Adds Amigos

CMS Weekly is a Technology Podcast with news from the world of Content Management and Enterprise Social Networking

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SEARCH ANY STORY YOU HEAR ON THE PODCAST

SuperDome Behind the Glass

by Andrew McCaskey
This past Monday, we were able to participate in the HP Tech Day series for the SuperDome Server.

It has been almost ten years since HP introduced the award winning product, and it has worn the years well.

Complete coverage of the event will be found at SDRNews – but here is the chat and Twitter stream from our live coverage to give you an idea of the event’s scope.

<a href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&#038;task=viewaltcast&#038;altcast_code=04c84dd374″ mce_href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&amp;task=viewaltcast&amp;altcast_code=04c84dd374″ >HP SuperDome Tech Day</a>

Twitter Stream from HP SuperDome Tech Day

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After an opening caveat that all product comparisons are flawed, Sirius Corp blogger tcallway proceeds to compare open source ECM products Alfresco and Nuxeo with the deeply entrenched Microsoft SharePoint.

SharePoint claims a broad range of functionality including BI, records and document management, web content management and eForms. But it comes with a hefty price tag, and you never stop paying – it’s a lease program with license fees on a host of products – in fact, everything in the Microsoft Stack that is also required to make the package complete.

By comparison, Alfresco is free and runs on Linux, Unix and Mac, in addition to Windows, and supports any LDAP server. Use MySQL or PostgreSQL with Alfresco, and don’t fret purchasing an environment to extend Alfresco – it’s all included. And you don’t need licenses to provide your services to your clients.

However, it’s only the Labs Edition that’s free. The code for the Enterprise version is not available, and this version does have an annual subscription, but is worth it.

The reviewer went on to compare Nuxeo, another open source solution, with Alfresco. He claims both are beautiful, fast and feature-rich, but liked the Nuxeo UI with it’s drag and drop file management better than Alfresco. Nuxeo runs on all mainstream OS’s and is very extensible, and the code is available for its enterprise version. Close, but not close enough. But when the reviewer tried to reach a live person, in the main UK office, or the French office they were forwarded to, the Nuxeo offering came up lacking.

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Alfresco announced plans to double the number of SI partners in North and South America to meet increasing demand. Adding 40 new system integrators will help serve the growing market, which includes new American customers Virgin Mobile, FedEx and Sun Microsystems.

Alfresco has chosen not to offer direct consulting or professional services, but rather focus on developing an enterprise-class ECM platform. This is an exciting opportunity for independent alfresco users and developers to move to the next level and become an Alfresco Partner. System Integrators provide expertise consulting, integration and migration services for Alfresco content management solutions. All System Integrators have trained and certified Alfresco consultants on staff. The new SI partners will support new project implementations and assist with migrations away from legacy ECM systems.

Community Edition downloads have now exceeded 1.7 million.

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Alfresco announced last week that their free Community Edition 3.2 is now available for the Ubuntu Server Edition. An easy to install package can be downloaded from the Ubuntu software repositories apt-get install alfresco-community.

Ubuntu has emerged as the leading Linux platform for Alfresco ECMS. Both systems are known for their ease of use and simple environments. Ubuntu has consistently been the top Linux distribution in Alfresco’s Open Source Barometer survey, and with the delivery of a very easy installation it is expected that many more organizations will explore the use of open source software both to save money and deliver exceptional value. In the prevalent economic conditions very few can afford to overlook the combination of Alfresco and Ubuntu.

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